U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/967,647, filed Sep. 6, 2007, is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Presently, it is desired to provide the capability to densely compact harvested cotton into a unitary module on the harvesting machine as the cotton is being harvested, so as to eliminate the intermediate steps of compacting the cotton in a basket of the harvester then transporting either the collected cotton to a module builder or the module builder to the cotton and unloading the cotton into the module builder, and then further compacting the cotton into a cotton module. In the combined harvesting and module building machine, it is preferably desired to compact the cotton periodically in a compacting or module building chamber as it is received from the harvesting apparatus. In some instances, when the module is complete, it may still be desirable or necessary to continue harvesting until a row or section of a field is complete. As a result, a significant amount of loose or uncompacted cotton may be present in the module building chamber of the machine. This loose cotton can present a problem, as at least some part of it is likely to be unloaded with the module, which is be undesirable. In particular, loose cotton left on the ground is crop loss, and picking it up requires expenditure of time and effort.
Therefore, what is sought is an unloader for a cotton compacting structure such as a module builder of a combined cotton harvester and module builder, which effectively and conveniently contains and recovers loose cotton that may pass from the chamber of the compactor as a compacted cotton module is unloaded therefrom, such that the loose cotton is not lost and which overcomes one or more of the problems set forth above.